Intel definitely has a challenge – having gone through both of Apple’s PowerPC migrations, this was the smoothest yet because we’re in a much better place with open source software dominating and internet distribution being the norm. I remember things being held up by proprietary compilers or needing to port hand rolled assembly but this time around we’re using higher level languages & frameworks a lot more and it’s been mostly transparent. Similarly, back then getting hardware to build and test was a chore; now it’s a checkbox in the EC2 launch options.

Thinking about it, I knew that Intel not landing the first iPhone contract was a big loss on mobile but I don’t think anyone expected it to savage their traditional strongholds like this because that paved the way for so many tools not just being ported but heavily optimized for ARM. They’re certainly still doing a ton of business but now there’s a cap on how much profit they can take even if AMD completely founders.